We prove that the quotient space of a variationally complete group action is a good Riemannian orbifold. The result is generalized to singular Riemannian foliations without horizontal conjugate points.

Let X be a compact connected strongly pseudoconvex CR Manifold of real dimension 2n.1 in Cn+1. Tanaka introduced a spec- tral sequence E(p,q) r (X) with E(p,q) 1 (X) being the Kohn-Rossi cohomology group and E(k,0) 2 (X) being the holomorphic De Rham cohomology denoted by Hk h(X). We study the holomorphic De Rham cohomology in terms of the s-invariant of the isolated sin- gularities of the variety V bounded by X. We give a characterization of the singularities with vanishing s-invariants. For n ≥ 3, Yau used the Kohn-Rossi cohomology groups to solve the classical complex Plateau problem in 1981. For n = 2, the problem has re- mained unsolved for over a quarter of a century. In this paper, we make progress in this direction by putting some conditions on X so that V will have very mild singularities. Specifically, we prove that if dimX = 3 and H2 h(X) = 0, then X is a boundary of complex variety V with only isolated quasi-homogeneous singularities such that the dual graphs of the exceptional sets in the resolution are star shaped and all curves are rational.

Continuing the program of [DS] and [U1], we introduce refinements of the Donaldson-Smith standard surface count which are designed to count nodal pseudoholomorphic curves and curves with a prescribed decomposition into reducible components. In cases where a corresponding analogue of the Gromov-Taubes invariant is easy to define, our invariants agree with those analogues. We also prove a vanishing result for some of the invariants that count nodal curves.

In this paper we explicitly construct Moishezon twistor spaces on nCP2 for arbitrary n ≥ 2 which admit a holomorphic Caction. When n = 2, they coincide with Y. Poon’s twistor spaces. When n = 3, they coincide with the ones studied by the author in [14]. When n ≥ 4, they are new twistor spaces, to the best of the author’s knowledge. By investigating the anticanonical system, we show that our twistor spaces are bimeromorphic to conic bundles over certain rational surfaces. The latter surfaces can be regarded as orbit spaces of the C-action on the twistor spaces. Namely they are minitwistor spaces. We explicitly determine their defining equations in CP4. It turns out that the structure of the minitwistor space is independent of n. Further, we explicitly construct a CP2-bundle over the resolution of this surface, and provide an explicit defining equation of the conic bundles. It shows that the number of irreducible components of the discriminant locus for the conic bundles increases as n does. Thus our twistor spaces have a lot of similarities with the famous LeBrun twistor spaces, where the minitwistor space CP1 ×CP1 in LeBrun’s case is replaced by our minitwistor spaces found in [15].

Let M be a closed surface diffeomorphic to S2 endowed with a Riemannian metric. Denote the diameter of M by d. We prove that for every x 2 M and every positive integer k there exist k distinct geodesic loops based at x of length  20kd.